Halloween Ends Quotes

Halloween is one of my favorite holidays. Christmas and the others can end up making you sad, because you know you should be happy. But on Halloween you get to become anything that you want to be

Being alone is not the most awful thing in the world. You visit your museums and cultivate your interests and remind yourself how lucky you are not to be one of those spindly Sudanese children with flies beading their mouths. You make out To Do lists - reorganise linen cupboard, learn two sonnets. You dole out little treats to yourself - slices of ice-cream cake, concerts at Wigmore Hall. And then, every once in a while, you wake up and gaze out of the window at another bloody daybreak, and think, I cannot do this anymore. I cannot pull myself together again and spend the next fifteen hours of wakefulness fending off the fact of my own misery. People like Sheba think that they know what it's like to be lonely. They cast their minds back to the time they broke up with a boyfriend in 1975 and endured a whole month before meeting someone new. Or the week they spent in a Bavarian steel town when they were fifteen years old, visiting their greasy-haired German pen pal and discovering that her hand-writing was the best thing about her. But about the drip drip of long-haul, no-end-in-sight solitude, they know nothing. They don't know what it is to construct an entire weekend around a visit to the laundrette. Or to sit in a darkened flat on Halloween night, because you can't bear to expose your bleak evening to a crowd of jeering trick-or-treaters. Or to have the librarian smile pityingly and say, ‘Goodness, you're a quick reader!’ when you bring back seven books, read from cover to cover, a week after taking them out. They don't know what it is to be so chronically untouched that the accidental brush of a bus conductor's hand on your shoulder sends a jolt of longing straight to your groin. I have sat on park benches and trains and schoolroom chairs, feeling the great store of unused, objectless love sitting in my belly like a stone until I was sure I would cry out and fall, flailing, to the ground. About all of this, Sheba and her like have no clue.

But about the drip drip of long-haul, no-end-in-sight solitude, they know nothing. They don't know what it is to construct an entire weekend around a visit to the laundrette. Or to sit in a darkened flat on Halloween night, because you can't bear to expose your bleak evening to a crowd of jeering trick-or-treaters. Or to have the librarian smile pityingly and say, ‘Goodness, you're a quick reader!’ when you bring back seven books, read from cover to cover, a week after taking them out. They don't know what it is to be so chronically untouched that the accidental brush of a bus conductor's hand on your shoulder sends a jolt of longing straight to your groin.

Did you know that Halloween started because long ago people believed that one day a year at the end of the fall harvest, the spirits would return to walk the earth? On that day, people wore masks so the spirits wouldn’t recognize them.

It isn’t always true that a critical end justifies desperate means.

Well, how did you die, then?” the old man finally asked. “Die?” Matthew threw back. “Are you crazy? I’m not dead. I’m just very late.

I'm the guy who checks the weather report every day hoping for a thunderstorm.

But I can think of nothing on earth so beautiful as the final haul on Halloween night, which, for me, was ten to fifteen pounds of candy, a riot of colored wrappers and hopeful fonts,snub-nosed chocolate bars and SweeTARTS, the seductive rattle of Jujyfruits and Good & Plenty and lollipopsticks all akimbo, the foli ends of mini LifeSavers packs twinkling like dimes, and a thick sugary perfume rising up from the pillowcase.

Across a golden Autumn tapestry appear the spirits of our ancient selves demanding recognition and reward for one haunted night. Sated, they retreat from winter’s onslaught and retire to subconscious hibernation for another twelvemonth.

How late is it? How long have we been sitting here? I look at my watch – three thirty and the day is almost ending. It’s October. All those kids recently returned to classrooms with new bags and pencil cases will be looking forward to half term already. How quickly it goes. Halloween soon, then firework night. Christmas. Spring. Easter. Then there’s my birthday in May. I’ll be seventeen. How long can I stave it off? I don’t know. All I know is that I have two choices – stay wrapped in blankets and get on with dying, or get the list back together and get on with living.

Halloween, the one night when we embrace the darkness from which all of America is descended. October is the gateway to the wonderful, mystical finale of the American year. A place where life ends and the celebration of life briefly begins.

How about this?” she retorted, her voice deceptively flirtatious, and in that small, stolen moment in his mind, he quickly spun and grasped her by the small of her back, pulled her close into to him, and made her his. And maybe she resisted at first before giving in, or maybe she didn’t—maybe she’d wanted this just as long as he had. But none of that would matter, because they would finally be together, starting at that moment and for the rest of their lives. And they would love each other and raise children and make music, and life would suddenly be worth living, and Christ, how could anyone ever throw something like that away?

I hate this night. I hate that it makes me a person so truly removed from the real me; this man who sits in silence in his parlor – purposely quarantined from his family – is not who I want to be. But on Halloween night, this awful impostor wafts over me like morning fog, and I know there’s no resisting him. Like one anticipates the common cold brought on by a harsh winter, I know this broken and terrified man will soon be visiting when the evening of October 31st falls upon us. And on this yearly autumn night, he will sit and drink. And remember.

I’m an old man, now. I’ve been alone since my 17th birthday. I’d wanted to marry, have a bunch of kids, and maybe be a grandpa. The big family around the Thanksgiving table, laughing and pouring wine and cracking jokes and harmlessly teasing the missus—I wanted that. I wanted to do something good with my life—something right. I didn’t want what happened to Danny, my best childhood friend, to be the only mark I’d ever make in this world. But I thought it best not to fancy such hopes and dreams: a family, love. I’d been cursed by my best friend, and I thought it right not to inflict that curse on anyone who’d be foolish enough to love me.

Everything is ecstasy, inside... Close your eyes, let your hands and nerve-endings drop, stop breathing for 3 seconds, listen to the silence inside...and you will remember. Jack Kerouac

As I worked I continued to be a bit terrified in the back of my mind that it would be awful in the end, a big mishmash of nothing in particular, and there I would be, having wasted a whole week of my life destroying things I wanted to keep. But I should have trusted the long history of women who've come before me making rag rugs from everything that wasn't nailed down because it wasn't like that at all. Instead it was like a big, incredible tapestry that just happened to--if you could decipher it--tell a million little stories from my life. I could look at it and see my old lace slip and the girls' party dresses and my high school rainbow tie-dyes, the Irish kilt and the Halloween clown pants and so many, many other things. It was all in there somewhere. I felt like the miller's daughter in the fairy tale, the one who stays up all night spinning straw into gold. But who needs yellow metal, anyway? The was way better.

The school year progressed slowly. I felt as if I had been in the sixth grade for years, yet it was only October. Halloween was approaching. Coming from Ireland, we had never thought of it as a big holiday, though Sarah and I usually went out trick-or treating. For the last couple of years I had been too sick to go out, but this year Halloween fell on a day when I felt quiet fine. My mother was the one who came up with the Eskimo idea. I put on a winter coat, made a fish out of paper, which I hung on the end of a stick, and wrapped my face up in a scarf. My hair was growing in, and I loved the way the top of the hood rubbed against it. By this time my hat had become part of me; I took it off only at home. Sometimes kids would make fun of me, run past me, knock my hat off, and call me Baldy. I hated this, but I assumed that one day my hair would grow in, and on that day the teasing would end. We walked around the neighborhood with our pillowcase sacks, running into other groups of kids and comparing notes: the house three doors down gave whole candy bars, while the house next to that gave only cheap mints. I felt wonderful. It was only as the night wore on and the moon came out and the older kids, the big kids, went on their rounds that I began to realize why I felt so good. No one could see me clearly. No one could see my face.

Raindrops the size of bullets thundered on the castle windows for days on end; the lake rose, the flowerbeds turned into muddy streams and Hagrid's pumpkins swelled to the size of garden sheds. Oliver Wood's enthusiasm for regular training sessions, however, was not dampened, which was why Harry was to be found, late one stormy Saturday afternoon a few days before Hallowe'en, returning to the Gryffindor Tower, drenched to the skin and splattered with mud.

some nights . . .” “They say the moon is made of green cheese,” Butch said. “And I’m going to turn into a pumpkin at midnight if we don’t get out of here.” He took my hand and led the way across the room. Louise Jane called out to me one last time. “It shouldn’t be a problem leading the haunted lighthouse tour into the Lady’s room, Lucy. You’ll be gone by Halloween, isn’t that right?” Chapter 15 “I hope you had a nice evening, despite how it ended,” Butch said as we walked to his car.

If you don’t calmly walk away, I will fuck you again, harder. And I won’t be able to stop. I will fuck you so hard, so many times, you’ll be raw and begging me to end it. I will cover you with my demon seed until you’re drenched in me, head to toe.

As the thing came closer, what was left of Nick’s body became revealed and I could see how the dead boy’s eyes had bled from the trauma inflicted upon him; they dripped with steady succession onto the floor between his splayed legs. He looked like a rejected marionette tossed haphazardly in the corner by a frustrated puppeteer, his head drooping so low that his chin rested against his chest. His motionless arms lay at his sides, both of them squeezed into tight fists, as if he’d died futilely trying to defend himself.

What the fuck is this rubbish supposed to be? Special treatment? Ha, it isn’t fucking Halloween, you oddball pack of Addams family rejects. I told you Mini-Morticia was a fucking freak and here’s the proof. Looks like the whole family spend a little too much time swimming around in the murky end of the gene pool.

There will be a cauldron of spiced hot cider, and pumpkin shortbread fingers with caramel and fudge dipping sauces as our freebies, and I've done plenty of special spooky treats. Ladies' fingers, butter cookies the shape of gnarled fingers with almond fingernails and red food coloring on the stump end. I've got meringue ghosts and cups of "graveyard pudding," a dark chocolate pudding layered with dark Oreo cookie crumbs, strewn with gummy worms, and topped with a cookie tombstone. There are chocolate tarantulas, with mini cupcake bodies and legs made out of licorice whips, sitting on spun cotton candy nests. The Pop-Tart flavors of the day are chocolate peanut butter, and pumpkin spice. The chocolate ones are in the shape of bats, and the pumpkin ones in the shape of giant candy corn with orange, yellow, and white icing. And yesterday, after finding a stash of tiny walnut-sized lady apples at the market, I made a huge batch of mini caramel apples.

She wanted all the statues to shatter on the spot. She wished they weren't so... naked. So different. It reminded her of last year, when her mother had taken her to the sixth-grade honors banquet at her old school. Aru had worn what she thought was her prettiest outfit: a bright blue salwar kameez flecked with tiny star-shaped mirrors and embroidered with thousand of silver threads. Her mother had worn a deep red sari. Aru had felt like part of a fairy tale. At least until the moment they had entered the banquet hall, and every gaze had looked too much like pity. Or embarrassment. One of the girls had loudly whispered, Doesn't she know it isn't Halloween?

And it can also be hard to be a part of the oppressed culture, and stand up for your ownership over your cultural art and practices, and know that other people from your culture may disagree with you and give permission for what is sacred to you to be used and changed. However this debate plays out for the individual situations you may find yourself in, know that it cannot end well if it does not start with enough respect for the marginalized culture in question to listen when somebody says "this hurts me." And if that means that your conscience won't allow you to dress as a geisha for Halloween, know that even then, in the grand scheme of things - you are not the victim.

The last clear thought I have is of my grandmother’s rust-colored wall clock ticking away in the darkness of my apartment—my sanctuary where I dreamed and desired and hoped for goodness and love. I wonder how long that clock will tick without anyone around to hear it. I wonder if maybe I should have taken my grandmother’s silverware or jewelry instead. I wonder – if I knew then what I know now – if I still would have approached Jade that first night and invited her into my life, only to watch as she took it from me and fed it to some Godless thing, as my mother had called it. Would I still have given myself over to her, knowing it would end the same way, with the barbaric flicker of hope that this time she could love me?

Today is October first. It barged in on a gust of chilly air with red and orange leaves on its heels. Morning fog settled over our narrow streets like a cold, wet blanket, and everyone—and I mean everyone—is already wearing their chunkiest sweaters. For most people I know, October isn’t just the end of T-shirts and flip-flops; it’s the beginning of the best month of the year. Halloween month.

He walked steadily, feeling them behind him. His stride did not falter; he pretended they weren’t there. He pretended that all was well—that those hideous things knew nothing about what he had done earlier in the night. But each pumpkin he passed nearly leapt off its porch or railing or wooden chair, expanded and morphed and throbbed as if in a funhouse mirror, and joined the procession behind him. The wind picked up, suddenly and fiercely, and construction paper decorations adorning the houses that surrounded him flapped helplessly against their doors and windows. The man ducked against the cold wind, and from the pursuing army of the jack-o’-lanterns behind him. Cardboard skeletons with fastener joints and witches with shredded yarn hair and ghosts with cotton ball sheets and black crayon eyes escaped their thumbtacks and scotch tape and newspaper twine and they flashed and danced in his face. He brushed at them desperately with his hands, attempting to tear a hole through them and escape.

Imitation nation by nation, the simple means of communication and conflict. Stranger than fiction, always has been this way. In the heart of Rome, I never wanted this Halloween season to end, sweet dreams of dark love and wild west wide nights the universe was inside all along. The mystic river beyond metaphysical questions, I can't believe these pink walls anymore, can't remember the names of every street corner I lost my mind to every kind of street art sensual experience. Sunrise rooftops, all the make-up in the world couldn't heal the wounds from the false words in the every day scene of the fiery red lips predicting a gone future puff by single breath. Seeing my skin peel off the city lights.

from Labor Day through Halloween, the place is almost unbearably beautiful. The air during these weeks seems less like ether and more like a semisolid, clear and yet dense somehow, as if it were filled with the finest imaginable golden pollen. The sky tends toward brilliant ice-blue, and every thing and being is invested with a soft, gold-ish glow. Tin cans look good in this light; discarded shopping bags do. I’m not poet enough to tell you what the salt marsh looks like at high tide. I confess that when I lived year-round in Provincetown, I tended to become irritable toward the end of October, when one supernal day after another seemed to imply that the only reasonable human act was to abandon your foolish errands and plans, go outside, and fall to your knees.

A graveyard. It's the largest cemetery I've ever seen--a place Jack would surely love. A long rectangle of green lawn lined with rows and rows of old, moss-coated and weather-worn gravestones. Rain pounds the earth, and the cold tickle of air against my neck reminds me of the cemetery in Halloween Town. A feeling that exists in every cemetery, it seems. That hint of death. Of sorrow. Of lives brought to an end. But I don't have to go far before I find a small stone structure, an ornate mausoleum with spires along the roofline and a copper door, tarnished green from the rain. A tomb where the dead are placed to rest. I glance up the path, the cemetery glistening in the wet air. I have passed through many realms, all the way into the human world to a city made strangely silent, and now this mausoleum is my way home. My way back to Jack.

Her new fever, her anxiety which changed itself to anger was even more of a toy to him. A part of his attention, secret until now, leaned forward to scan every pore of her Halloween face. Somehow, irresistibly, the prime thing was: nothing mattered. Life in the end seemed a prank of such size you could only stand off at this end of the corridor to note its meaningless length and its quite unnecessary height, a mountain built to such ridiculous immensities you were dwarfed in its shadow and mocking of its pomp. So with death this near he thought numbly but purely upon a billion vanities, arrivals, departures, idiot excursions of boy, boy-man, man and old-man goat. He had gathered and stacked all manner of foibles, devices, playthings of his egotism and now, between all the silly corridors of books, the toys of his life swayed. And none more grotesque than this thing named Witch Gypsy Reader-of-Dust, tickling, that’s what! just tickling the air! Fool! Didn’t she know what she was doing!

Her new fever, her anxiety which changed itself to anger was even more of a toy to him. A part of his attention, secret until now, leaned forward to scan every pore of her Halloween face. Somehow, irresistibly, the prime thing was: nothing mattered. Life in the end seemed a prank of such size you could only stand off at this end of the corridor to note its meaningless length and its quite unnecessary height, a mountain built to such ridiculous immensities you were dwarfed in its shadow and mocking of its pomp. So with death this near he thought numbly but purely upon a billion vanities, arrivals, departures, idiot excursions of boy, boy-man, man and old-man goat. He had gathered and stacked all manner of foibles, devices, playthings of his egotism and now, between all the silly corridors of books, the toys of his life swayed. And none more grotesque than this thing named Witch Gypsy Reader-of-Dust, tickling, that’s what! just tickling the air! Fool! Didn’t she know what she was doing!

The End and Happy Halloween

I love the St. Louis Cardinals baseball team for many reasons and they have given me some wonderful memories. When I look back, I don't think about the games they lost but I remember going to see the games when I was a little boy with my grandfather. I remember talking to my mom on the phone after the Cardinals won the World Series in 2006 while I was dressed up in my Captain of the Fallopian Swim Team Halloween costume. I remember taking my lovely wife to her first Cardinals game where she broke out in hives due to the heat and humidity. I remember the joy I felt as I sat with my little man watching our first Cardinals game together at Busch Stadium. I know I need to take my obsession down a notch but in the end it is worth it because it takes me back to times I will never forget and always cherish.

A friend asked me, 'Do you want to come with?' I thought for a moment before replying, 'With what ... an air rifle, toaster strudels, extra pillowcases, steak knives ... paper shredder ... Halloween mask ... am I getting warm?' NEVER end a sentence with a preposition.

I just put the Erlking on the bench and laid a beat-down on freaking Santa Claus,” I told them. “So you tell me. Who’s next? Who comes to make an end of the Winter Knight, a peer of the Winter Court and Mab’s chosen? Who is at the top of this food chain? Because tonight is Halloween, and I am damned well not afraid of any of you.

Then there was only the sound of the rain outside in the endless blackness of the long night and, presently, the rising tones of a pitiful wailing within and without, spreading across the station, the town, and the land without end.

I've ended up with what are essentially dinner rolls that tried to dress as pretzels for Halloween. Benny's, meanwhile, are mall-food-court-level perfection. Apparently the boiling part---plus baking soda---is what gives pretzels their tough, dark brown exterior. Add that to the ever-growing list of things I didn't know about cooking.

Motherhood, despite my good intentions, often leaves me feeling like I’m making a huge mess. Yet, I’m supposed to be the one restoring order. My shortcomings bulldoze my confidence, and I don’t always like the person I am at the end of the day. Sometimes I wonder how my husband still loves the mess I see in the mirror. My family deserves someone who patiently gives them her all, not someone who steals the good candy out of their Halloween buckets after they go to bed then shamelessly goes back for seconds.

Our contemporary Western celebrations forget the dead altogether, or at least remove them from any association with grief and loss. They offer no comfort to those who mourn. We are, after all, a society that has done all it can to erase death, to pursue youth to the bitter end, and to sideline the elderly and infirm. For most of us, the old tradition of laying out our own dead is long forgotten, and the idea that we might be intimate with death is now some kind of a gothic joke. Today's Halloween simply reflects what we secretly think—that death is a surrender to decay that makes us monsters.

I WANDER THE film criticism district, formulating theories, grinding axes; it keeps me sane in these insane times to return to my roots, to praise those films and filmmakers worthy of an audience’s attention, to destroy those filmmakers who loose self-satisfied garbage onto the world. Consider Stranger Than Fiction, I say to my imagined lecture hall full of cinephiles: a wonderfully quirky film starring William Ferrell and the always adorkable Zooey Deschanel. The work done here by director Marc Forster (who directed the unfortunately misguided, misogynistic, and racistic Monster’s Ball) and screenwriter Zachary H. Elms is stellar in that all the metacinematic techniques work, its construction analogous to that of a fine Swiss watch (no accident that a wristwatch figures so prominently into the story!). Compare this to any mess written by Charlie Kaufman. Stranger Than Fiction is the film Kaufman would’ve written if he were able to plan and structure his work, rather than making it up as he goes along, throwing in half-baked concepts willy-nilly, using no criterion other than a hippy-dippy “that’d be cool, man.” Such a criterion might work if the person making that assessment had even a shred of humanism within his soul. Kaufman does not, and so he puts his characters through hellscapes with no hope of them achieving understanding or redemption. Will Ferrell learns to live fully in the course of Stranger Than Fiction. Dame Emily Thomson, who plays his “author,” learns her own lessons about compassion and the value and function of art. Had Kaufman written this film, it would have been a laundry list of “clever” ideas culminating in some unearned emotional brutality and a chain reaction of recursional activity wherein it is revealed that the author has an author who has an author who has an author who has an author, et chetera, thus leaving the audience depleted, depressed, and, most egregiously, cheated. What Kaufman does not understand is that such “high concepts” are not an end in themselves but an opportunity to explore actual mundane human issues. Kaufman is a monster, plain and simple, but a monster unaware of his staggering ineptitude (Dunning and Kruger could write a book about him!). Kaufman is Godzilla with dentures, Halloween’s Mike Myers with a rubber knife, Pennywise the Clown with contact dermatitis from living in a sewer. He is a pathetic—

This is my Will, this is.’ She got a bit of blotting paper over the top part of it but the bottom of it’s quite clear. She said ‘I’m writing something here on this piece of paper and I want you to be a witness of what I’ve written and of my signature at the end of it.’ So she starts writing along the page. Scratchy pen she always used, she wouldn’t use Biros or anything like that. And she writes two or three lines of writing and then she signed her name, and then she says to me, ‘Now, Mrs. Leaman, you write your name there. Your name and your address’ and then she says to Jim ‘And now you write your name underneath there, and your address too. There. That’ll do. Now you’ve seen me write that and you’ve seen my signature and you’ve written your names, both of you, to say that’s that.’ And then she says ‘That’s all. Thank you very much.’ So we goes out of the room. Well, I didn’t think nothing more of it at the time, but I wondered a bit. And it happened as I turns my head just as I was going out of the room. You see the door doesn’t always latch properly. You have to give it a pull, to make it click. And so I was doing that—I wasn’t really looking, if you know what I mean—

The Hercule Poirot Reading List It is possible to read the Poirot stories in any order. If you want to consider them chronologically (in terms of Poirot’s lifetime), we recommend the following: ❑ The Mysterious Affair at Styles [1920] ❑ The Murder on the Links [1923] ❑ The Regatta Mystery and Other Stories (US Short Story Collection) [1939] ❑ Poirot Investigates (Short Story Collection) [1924] ❑ Poirot’s Early Cases (Short Story Collection) [1974] ❑ The Murder of Roger Ackroyd [1926] ❑ The Big Four [1927] ❑ The Mystery of the Blue Train [1928] ❑ Peril at End House [1932] ❑ Lord Edgware Dies [1933] ❑ Murder on the Orient Express [1934] ❑ Three Act Tragedy [1935] ❑ Death in the Clouds [1935] ❑ Poirot and the Regatta Mystery (Published in The Complete Short Stories: Hercule Poirot) [1936] ❑ The ABC Murders [1936] ❑ Murder in Mesopotamia [1936] ❑ Cards on the Table [1936] ❑ The Witness for the Prosecution and Other Stories (US Short Story Collection) [1948] ❑ Murder in the Mews (Short Story Collection) [1938] ❑ Dumb Witness [1937] ❑ Death on the Nile [1937] ❑ Appointment with Death [1937] ❑ Hercule Poirot’s Christmas [1938] ❑ Sad Cypress [1940] ❑ One, Two Buckle My Shoe [1940] ❑ Evil Under the Sun [1941] ❑ Five Little Pigs [1942] ❑ The Hollow [1946] ❑ The Labours of Hercules (Short Story Collection) [1947] ❑ Taken at the Flood [1945] ❑ Mrs. McGinty’s Dead [1952] ❑ After the Funeral [1953] ❑ Hickory Dickory Dock [1955] ❑ Hercule Poirot and the Greenshore Folly [2014] ❑ Dead Man’s Folly [1956] ❑ Cat Among the Pigeons [1959] ❑ Double Sin and Other Stories (US Short Story Collection) [1961] ❑ The Under Dog and Other Stories (US Short Story Collection) [1951] ❑ The Harlequin Tea Set and Other Stories (US Short Story Collection) [1997] ❑ The Clocks [1963] ❑ Third Girl [1966] ❑ Hallowe’en Party [1969] ❑ Elephants Can Remember [1972] ❑ Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case [1975]

Thoughts On My End by Stewart Stafford My last moments slip away, On which day, at what time? Snow chilling bones faster? Sweat in blinding sunshine? Halloween, Xmas or Easter? Evening or just after dawn? Pass away on my birthday? Gifts, mass cards all drawn? Will it be in long, slow agony? Or mercifully fast and painless? What will my drug of choice be? Will I be conscious or brainless? Who will be at my bedside? Many or no one, who can say? Kind words or total silence? I’ll hear and be on my way. © Stewart Stafford, 2022. All rights reserved.

Já estava acostumado aos amputados, às vitimas do agente laranja, aos famintos, pobres, garotos de rua de seis anos de idade que você encontra às três da madrugada gritando "Feliz ano novo! Olá! Bye-Bye!" em inglês, e depois aponta para suas bocas e faz "bum bum?". Estou ficando quase indiferente aos garotos famintos, sem pernas, sem braços, cobertos de cicatrizes, desesperançados, dormindo no chão, em triciclos, na beirada do rio. Mas não estava preparado para o homem sem camisa, com um corte de cabelo a la forma de pudim, que me detém na saída do mercado, estendendo a mão. No passado ele sofreu queimaduras e tornou-se uma figura humana quase irreconhecível, a pele transformada numa imensa cicatriz sob a coroa de cabelos pretos. Da cintura para cima (e sabe Deus até onde), a pele é uma cicatriz só; ele não tem lábios, nem nariz, nem sobrancelha. Suas orelhas são como betume, como se tivesse mergulhado e moldado num alto-forno, sendo retirado pouco antes de derreter por completo. Mexe seus dentes como uma abóbora de Halloween, mas não emite um único som através do que foi um dia, uma boca. Sinto um murro no estômago. Minha animação exuberante dos dias e horas anteriores desmorona. Fico paralisado, piscando e pensando na palavra napalm, que oprime cada batida do meu coração. De repente nada mais é divertido. Sinto vergonha. Como pude vir até esta cidade, até este país por razões tão fúteis, cheio de entusiasmo por algo tão...sem sentido, como sabores, texturas, culinária? A famíla daquele homem deve ter sido pulverizada, ele mesmo transformado num boneco desgraçado, como um modelo de cera de madame Tussaud, a pele escorrendo como vela pingando. O que estou fazendo aqui? Escrevendo um livro de merda? Sobre comida? Fazendo um programinha leve e inútil de tevê, um showzinho de bosta? A ficha caiu de uma vez e fiquei me desprezando, odiando o que faço e o fato de estar ali. Imobilizado, piscando nervosamente e suando frio, sinto que todo mundo na rua está me observando, que irradio culpa e desconforto, que qualquer passante vai associar os ferimentos daquele homem a mim e ao meu país. Dou uma espiada nos outros turistas ocidentais que vagueiam por ali com suas bermudas da Banana Republic e suas camisas pólo da Land´s End, suas confortáveis sandálias Weejun e Bierkenstock, e sinto um desejo irracional de assassiná-los. Parecem malignos, comedores de carniça. O Zippo com a inscrição pesa no meu bolso, deixou de ser engraçado, virou uma coisa tão pouco divertida quanto a cabeça encolhida de um amigo morto. Tudo o que comer terá gosto de cinzas daqui pra frente. Fodam-se os livros. Foda-se a televisão. Nem mesmo consigo dar algum dinheiro ao coitado. Tenho as mãos trêmulas, estou inutilizado, tomado pela paranoia, Volto correndo ao quarto refrigerado do New World Hotel, me enrosco na cama ainda desfeita, fico olhando para o teto com os olhos cheios de lágrimas, incapaz de digerir ou entender o que presenciei e impotente para fazer qualquer coisa a respeito. Não saio nem como nada pelas 24 horas seguintes. A equipe de tevê acha que estou tendo um colapso nervoso. Saigon...Ainda em Saigon. O que vim fazer no Vietnã?

someone who said she was Jim’s mother. I was dating Jim at the time. But it was actually Tim’s mother, one of my close friends. She was asking me for dinner. It wasn’t until the very end of the phone conversation that I realized who I was really talking to. I would have absolutely died had I showed up at Jim’s house for dinner!” “Not sure it was a matter of Danielle misunderstanding the girl,” Brian said. “I’m sure she’s okay. Kids love to play those kinds of tricks on adults,” Joe said. The next moment Carla showed up to take their drink order. Like she had with Adam’s table, one of her first questions was, “Have you been to the haunted house yet?” “We went Saturday night,” Kelly told her. “It was fun. Pretty sophisticated haunted house, if you ask me.” Carla looked at Brian. “How did you like it?” Brian shook his head. “I’m not going. Haunted houses really are not my thing.” “You and Adam Nichols,” Carla said with a laugh. “What do you mean?” Brian asked. “He doesn’t want to go either. But you really should. Well worth the money. I hope they do it again next year,” Carla said. “It’s a good setting for a haunted house,” Brian muttered. “It’s a natural.” Carla turned to Kelly and said, “What did you think about the dead body in the hidden staircase? Did it freak you out, or did

By the age of six, I was already asking my mother, “When do we graduate from church?” At this point I had entered school and understood that while school was “not fun,” it was necessary. But there was a light at the end of the tunnel. Some day, many years away, I would be done with school, and the word for that was graduate. To my dismay I was told that the word to describe being done with church was death.

And it’s why I love saying yes. When you say yes you can start and end the day in two totally different places. Yes takes that space between unlimited possibilities and reality, and stretches it out so that anything can happen.

1. His back is full of knives. Notes are brittle around the blades. 2. He sleeps face down every night in a chalk outline of himself. 3. He has difficulties with metal detectors. 4. At birthday parties, someone might politely ask, may I borrow one of those knives to slice this chocolate cake? 5. He likes to stand with his back to walls. At restaurants, he likes the corner tables. 6. There is a detective who calls to ask him about the brittle notes. Also: a biographer, a woman who'd like to film a documentary, a curator of a museum, his mother. I can't read them, he says. They're on my back. 7. It would be a mistake for anyone to assume he wants the knives removed. 8. Most of the brittle notes are illegible. One of them, even, is written in French. 9. Every Halloween, he goes as a victim of a brutal stabbing. Once he tried going as a whale, but it was a hassle explaining away the knives. 10. He always wears the same bloody suit. 11. When he walks, he sounds like a tree still full of dead leaves holding on. 12. It is ok for children to count on his knives, but not to climb on them. 13. He saw his own shadow in a park. He moved his body to make the knives reach other people's shadows. He did it all evening. In the shadows, his knives looked like soft outstretched arms. 14. His back is running out of space. 15. On a trip to Paris, he fell in love and ended up staying for a few years. He got a job performing on the street with the country's best mimes. 16. The knives are what hold him together. It is the notes that are slowly killing him. 17. He is difficult to hold when he cries. 18. He will be very old when he dies and the Doctor will say, he was obviously stabbed, brutally and repeatedly. I'm sorry, the Doctor will say to a person in the room, but he's not going to make it.

They were hopeless brutes, truly. Hopeless little lost boys who’d gone to hell and back for me. They were the villains of the story and had a trail of blood and evil deeds behind their names. And I loved them more and more with each passing breath. They’d been worth every moment of doubt, every moment of confusion at solving this riddle of me, of Ash Grove. And finally, we’d reached the end of the page together. At least the end of this chapter, this book. We had endless more stories to write together for all of time.

I’m Callista Cirillo. Mafia princess. Long-suffering little sister and daughter of powerful men. Well, tonight that ends.

I promised that I would chase after her soul—we all did—and if that leads us to our end, then so be it. Boys, we’re going to hell… to kill the devil.

Deprive a cat of sleep and it would die in two weeks. Deprive a human and he would become psychotic. His work was killing people. How was he supposed to frighten these guys? Run up behind them in a halloween mask and shout boo? He never saw the point of views -- what did it matter if it was an ocean or a brick wall you were looking at? People travelled hundreds, sometimes thousands of miles to commit suicide someplace with a beautiful view. Did a view matter when oblivion beckoned? They could put him in a garbage bin after he was gone, for all he cared. That's all the human race was anyway. Garbage with attitude. A cutting word is worse than a bowstring. A cut may heal but a cut of the tongue does not. The Sakawa students were all from poor, underprivileged backgrounds. Sakawa was a mix of religious juju and modern internet technology. They were taught, in structured classes, the art of online fraud as well as arcane African rituals -- which included animal sacrifice -- to have a voodoo effect on their victims, ensuring the success of each fraud. of which there was a wide variety. The British Empire spend five hundred years plundering the world. The word is 'thanks'. 'That's what it is, Roy! He won't come out, he has locked the doors! What if he self-harms, Roy! I mean -- what if he kills himself?' 'I will have to take him off my Christmas list.' "Any chance you can recover any of it?' 'You sitting near a window, Gerry?' 'Near a window? Sure, right by a window?' 'Can you see the sky?' 'Uh-huh. Got a clear view.' 'See any pigs flying past?' To dream of death is good for those in fear, for the death have no more fears. '...Cleo took me to the opera once. I spent the whole time praying for a fat lady to come on stage and start singing. Or a heart attack --whichever come sooner.' '..there is something strongly powerful -- almost magnetic -- about internet romances. A connection that is far stronger than a traditional meeting of two people. Maybe because on the internet you can lie all the time, each person gives the other their good side. It's intoxicating. That's one of the things which makes it so dangerous -- and such easy pickings for fraudsters.' He was more than a little pleased that he was about to ruin his boss's morning -- and, with a bit of luck, his entire day. ..a guy who had been born angry and had just got even angrier with each passing year. '...Then at some point in the future, I'll probably die in an overcrowded hospital corridor with some bloody hung-over medical student jumping up and down on my chest because they couldn't find a defibrillator. 'Give me your hand, bro,' the shorter one said. 'That one, the right one, yeah.' On the screen the MasterChef contestant said, 'Now with a sharp knife...' Jules de Copland drove away from Gatwick Airport in.a new car, a small Kia, hired under a different name and card, from a different rental firm, Avis. 'I was talking about her attitude. But I'll tell you this, Roy. The day I can't say a woman -- or a man -- is plug ugly, that's the day I want to be taken out and shot.' It seems to me the world is in a strange place where everyone chooses to be offended all the time. 'But not too much in the way of brains,' GlennBranson chipped in. 'Would have needed the old Specialist Search Unite to find any trace of them.' 'Ever heard of knocking on a door?' 'Dunno that film -- was it on Netflix?' 'One word, four letters. Begins with an S for Sierra, ends with a T for Tango. Or if you'd like the longest version, we've been one word, six letters, begins with F for Foxtrot, ends with D for Delta.' No Cop liked entering a prison. In general there was a deep cultural dislike of all police officers by the inmates. And every officer entering.a prison, for whatever purposes, was always aware that if a riot kicked off while they were there, they could be both an instant hostage and a prime target for violence.

Deprive a cat of sleep and it would die in two weeks. Deprive a human and he would become psychotic. His work was killing people. How was he supposed to frighten these guys? Run up behind them in a halloween mask and shout boo? He never saw the point of views -- what did it matter if it was an ocean or a brick wall you were looking at? People travelled hundreds, sometimes thousands of miles to commit suicide someplace with a beautiful view. Did a view matter when oblivion beckoned? They could put him in a garbage bin after he was gone, for all he cared. That's all the human race was anyway. Garbage with attitude. A cutting word is worse than a bowstring. A cut may heal but a cut of the tongue does not. The Sakawa students were all from poor, underprivileged backgrounds. Sakawa was a mix of religious juju and modern internet technology. They were taught, in structured classes, the art of online fraud as well as arcane African rituals -- which included animal sacrifice -- to have a voodoo effect on their victims, ensuring the success of each fraud. of which there was a wide variety. The British Empire spend five hundred years plundering the world. The word is 'thanks'. 'That's what it is, Roy! He won't come out, he has locked the doors! What if he self-harms, Roy! I mean -- what if he kills himself?' 'I will have to take him off my Christmas list.' "Any chance you can recover any of it?' 'You sitting near a window, Gerry?' 'Near a window? Sure, right by a window?' 'Can you see the sky?' 'Uh-huh. Got a clear view.' 'See any pigs flying past?' To dream of death is good for those in fear, for the death have no more fears. '...Cleo took me to the opera once. I spent the whole time praying for a fat lady to come on stage and start singing. Or a heart attack --whichever come sooner.' '..there is something strongly powerful -- almost magnetic -- about internet romances. A connection that is far stronger than a traditional meeting of two people. Maybe because on the internet you can lie all the time, each person gives the other their good side. It's intoxicating. That's one of the things which makes it so dangerous -- and such easy pickings for fraudsters.' He was more than a little pleased that he was about to ruin his boss's morning -- and, with a bit of luck, his entire day. ..a guy who had been born angry and had just got even angrier with each passing year. '...Then at some point in the future, I'll probably die in an overcrowded hospital corridor with some bloody hung-over medical student jumping up and down on my chest because they couldn't find a defibrillator. 'Give me your hand, bro,' the shorter one said. 'That one, the right one, yeah.' On the screen the MasterChef contestant said, 'Now with a sharp knife...' Jules de Copland drove away from Gatwick Airport in.a new car, a small Kia, hired under a different name and card, from a different rental firm, Avis. 'I was talking about her attitude. But I'll tell you this, Roy. The day I can't say a woman -- or a man -- is plug ugly, that's the day I want to be taken out and shot.' It seems to me the world is in a strange place where everyone chooses to be offended all the time. 'But not too much in the way of brains,' GlennBranson chipped in. 'Would have needed the old Specialist Search Unite to find any trace of them.' 'Ever heard of knocking on a door?' 'Dunno that film -- was it on Netflix?' 'One word, four letters. Begins with an S for Sierra, ends with a T for Tango. Or if you'd like the longest version, we've been one word, six letters, begins with F for Foxtrot, ends with D for Delta.' No Cop liked entering a prison. In general there was a deep cultural dislike of all police officers by the inmates. And every officer entering.a prison, for whatever purposes, was always aware that if a riot kicked off while they were there, they could be both an instant hostage and a prime target for violence.

They were hopeless brutes, truly. Hopeless little lost boys who'd gone to hell and back for me. They were the villains of the story and had a trail of blood and evil deeds behind their names. And I loved them more and more with each passing breath. They'd been worth every moment of doubt, every moment of confusion at solving this riddle of me, of Ash Grove. And finally, we'd reached the end of the page together. At least the end of this chapter, this book. We had endless more stories to write together for all of time.

I finally, after more than two hundred years, find something that makes me want to live. And she is Death, and tasting her will kill me. In finding my life, I have found my death, and I have never been more sure, Blythe. You are the verse, the bridge, and the chorus. You are the melody of every song I’ve ever tried to write, and this time, I’m going to get the chords right. I know how this one ends. Now let me sing it. This is my choice, the most glorious risk I’ve ever been afforded. You don’t scare me. Let me taste you, my belladonna.

Ash Grove’s Hallows Fest is an eighteen and up masquerade dance festival spanning the whole of October. Begins when the sun goes down and ends when it ends. Come hidden, come spooky, come ready for tricks and treats. If you see a ghost, don’t scream. Or do. No one will care.

I rose to my knees, always on my knees for her, my luna. She joined me and wrapped around me in the hug. The same hug from October, from February, the same hug I’d be blessed with until the end of time and then after. “I love you, Wolf,” she whispered.

I don’t know what’s going to become of us after tonight, but if our time together ends this evening, I will still consider myself the luckiest man alive to have had you in my life for this long.

The Zombie Firetruck by Stewart Stafford Sirens moan, grave duty's flash of red, A mortuary whiff of something dead, Hoses trained with brains they suck, Your friendly neighbourhood zombie firetruck! All that remained of the human fire team, From the zombie pandemic of 2017, Still in their uniforms, their only treasures, Apocalyptic times call for end-time measures. When they reached the fire, people did scoff, They lurched, staggered, body parts fell off, As they wandered around, fire hoses forlorn, These knightly living dead faced a blazing dawn. The chief, hat off to his skeleton crew, In a voice once alive, now croaky like flu: 'To the hydrant, my ghouls, let's save Gothik Town, Or they'll call Ghostbusters, we'll be the clowns!' A glowering inferno, a cremation scene, Zombie firefighters, brave and light green. Through smoke and ash, they gravely stand, Composed decomposition with skeletal hand. Axeman Bony Ed led their clattering charge, Into the smoke, his cadavers did barge, The townsfolk looked on in dead of night, And disbelief, tiredness and mild fright. There soon followed medic Cemetery Phil, Decaying Murphy, Old Salty, and Dead Drill, Slab Stevens, Madly Hyde and Molly Voodoo, Determined to shake their initial hoodoo. A mother and baby backed by burning drapes, Team Macabre charged up the fire escape, Saving both and getting everyone out, Drank Brainer Ade as they leaked like a spout. Somehow, undead teamwork saved the day, No lives were lost as the water sprayed, Doused the flames, cool flatlined heroes, Much zombie kudos, no longer scary zeroes. The crowd cheered, did they ever doubt it? High fives lost hands but new ones sprouted, Frankenstein proud in their flapping flesh, Sure to get medals at the HalloweenFest. With a final groan and a clatter of bones, The zombie firetruck headed back home. Rotten yet proud, in their reanimated way, The risen would fight fires another day. © 2024, Stewart Stafford. All rights reserved.

Did someone break in?” “Looks that way,” Henry said. “We locked the door last night, so whoever it was must have picked the lock.” “Wait a minute,” Jessie said suddenly. “If someone was trying to get in, they’d pick the lock from the outside, right?” she asked. “They’d have to,” said Henry. “Well, look at these scratch marks.” The children bent and looked where Jessie was pointing. “So?” Benny asked. “If someone was trying to get in, he or she would be on the outside of the door, right?” Jessie asked. “But the scratches are on the inside.” “So this lock was picked from the inside,” Henry said. “So that means…” Violet began. “Someone was trying to break out,” said Jessie. The children looked back into the room. They looked all the way down to the other end where the coffin lay. And then they noticed something they hadn’t noticed before. Something even more frightening than the picked lock. The lid of the coffin was open. The Mystery of the Mummy's Curse

Finally, out of breath, they tried to slip behind some trash cans at the end of a narrow alley. But Floyd ducked a moment too late, and Alice’s rabbit ears gave them away. Leona squealed with delight. Yo Ho Ho! I see something funny. It’s Pirate Floyd And his baby bunny! The witches roared with laughter and slapped each other on the back. Floyd winced, but as he drew his saber, his face lit up with a pirate’s grin. First, he kept the witches at bay so his friends could carry little Alice to safety. Then, growling like a movie pirate, he swung out of reach on an overhanging tree limb, turned a quick flip, and somersaulted backward over the fence. “I didn’t know you could do that,” Mona said. Floyd looked surprised. “Neither did I.” “Come on,” shouted Wendell. “They’re right behind us!” They ran until they found themselves in an even stranger part of town. “It’s pretty creepy around here,” muttered Floyd. Wendell suggested they hide in the graveyard, but Mona scoffed. “You’ve got to be kidding.” “No, it’s perfect. They’ll never follow us into a place like this.” Actually, the witches didn’t mind the graveyard at all. “We see you, Wendell!” Leona crowed. What’s wrong with Wendell? Let me think. He must be MAD ‘Cause he’s dressed in pink! The witches shrieked and hooted, laughing so hard they nearly cried. For a moment Wendell’s face turned as pink as his smock. But then an idea began to brew. He reached into his mad scientist’s kit and started mixing potions. “Drink this!” he told his friends. “It will make us invisible.” At the word “invisible” the witches roared even louder. But their laughter turned to puzzled yelps when Wendell, Floyd, Mona, and Alice suddenly disappeared!

Nobody wants to be alone. Sure, we fill our lives with people, faces that come and go, we love a lot only to lose more in the end, and if we’re smart—really smart—we take our victories where we get them. But beneath our skins, we siren.

All in all, my Halloween times were happy memorable times.  I loved Halloween, still do, but I guess all good things have to come to an end sometime, right?  I was approaching that terrible age of twelve!  According to my mother, twelve was

The world didn’t end just because a man told a lie. That was good. The world would have ended a long time ago and many times over if it did.

One warm June morning, during rush hour, a man appeared at the entrance to the rag picker's shack. 'I am intruding,' the mysterious man said, startling the rag picker. The first thing Sam noticed was the green tie. Sam had seen green ties before certainly, it was just that Sam wasn't sure that he had ever seen that particular shade of green. It made him think of the green in a rainbow he had once seen, sparkling and brilliant, or a flash of green he once saw in a botanical garden. Sam wasn't sure, but the essence of the color resonated deep inside Sam. The tie was paired with shoes the shade and shine of the was red lips children sometimes wear at Halloween. With the conservative black suit and shirt, the outfit should have looked ridiculous. On this man it did not. Sam tried to collect his wits. 'O my soul. Who are you?' he asked more in wonder at the visitor than in fear. Sam was no longer used to people. He didn't give many people the time of day. Nevertheless, there was something about this one that was fascinating. It was as if he exuded life from every pore in his body. 'My name is Mr. Khadir. I am from the Middle East.' Sam thought the stranger was referring to the East End of Long Island. He figured the man was a commuter whose car had probably overheated on the Expressway. 'I am a stranger,' Mr Khadir continued, 'and so are you; come with me in these deserts so that you may seek God.

It felt as wrong as mixing cats and dogs, but not quite as wrong as mixing them with a food processor.

We know that letting our children eat too many sweets makes us a bad parent, hence the pointless ritual at Halloween when parents allow their children to go from house to house accumulating a big haul of treats, only to confiscate them at the end of the night, because they don’t want their child to get cavities. Yes despite their anxiety about sweets, parents will happily feed their children highly sweetened sports bars, fruit snacks and cereals which are sweets in all but name.

I Want More Cheese Jasper Van Dumpken was a twelve year old boy that lived on a farm. He had rosy cheeks, bright red hair, and a huge appetite. He ate rye bread with cheese and fresh milk for breakfast. At lunch, he usually ate macaroni and cheese. At dinner time, he ate a portion of meat and potatoes with lots of cheese of course. As you can see, cheese was Jasper’s favorite kind of food. Although Jasper’s parents weren’t particularly rich, they always had plenty to eat. However, because of Jasper’s craving for cheese they often ran out of it. His father would poke fun at him and ask him if he had a hole in his tummy, because he just couldn’t understand how he put so much cheese in there. One summer’s evening, Jasper climbed into bed with his stomach a little more filled than usual. He had stuffed himself with cheese curds all day. He felt a soft wind blow through his window and he took a sniff of the piny smell that came in from the tree nearby. That tree seemed to glow and he thought he saw beams of lights dancing under it. They seemed to be shaped like a girl. He laughed at the idea of it. Pretty soon though, he heard a voice whisper, “Come with us, there’s plenty of cheese.” Then again the voice whispered, “Come with us, there’s plenty of cheese.” Now Jasper was a very curious young man, and although something deep inside of him told him to stay put, he was ready for an adventure. So he put on his shoes and carefully climbed out his bedroom window. As he stepped out, he noticed three little women. They were absolutely beautiful and had wings that shined like fireflies. “Come with us and we will show you where we keep all of our cheese,” they said together. Their soft voices sounded like music to his ears. He wanted to try their cheese so he followed them to end of the forest. They told him to sit down. They disappeared and came back carrying all different kinds of cheese. Some that Jasper had never even tried before. Jasper ate until his poor little tummy ached. “Stop, please, stop! No more cheese!” he cried out. But the fairies kept bringing more until a huge wall had formed around him. Jasper was now trapped. He started to scream for help, but it was no use. He yelled until he was tired and fell right to sleep. Several hours later Jasper woke up, he rubbed his eyes and expected to see mounds of cheese around him. But instead he was back in his bedroom. Jasper breathed a sigh of relief because it had all been a terrible nightmare. From that day forward, Jasper never ate another piece of cheese again. Although he had once loved it, after that horrible dream, he couldn’t even stand the smell of cheese anymore.

Horseman is the haunting sequel to the 1820 novel The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving and takes place two decades after the events that unfolded in the original. We are introduced to 14-year-old trans boy Bente “Ben” Van Brunt, who has been raised by his idiosyncratic grandparents - lively Brom “Bones” Van Brunt and prim Kristina Van Tassel - in the small town of Sleepy Hollow, New York, where gossip and rumour run rife and people are exceedingly closed-minded. He has lived with them on their farm ever since he was orphaned when his parents, Bendix and Fenna, died in suspicious and enigmatic circumstances. Ben and his only friend, Sander, head into the woodland one Autumn day to play a game known as Sleepy Hollow Boys, but they are both a little startled when they witness a group of men they recognise from the village discussing the headless, handless body of a local boy that has just been found. But this isn't the end; it is only the beginning. From that moment on, Ben feels an otherworldly presence following him wherever he ventures, and one day while scanning his grandfather’s fields he catches a fleeting glimpse of a weird creature seemingly sucking blood from a victim. An evil of an altogether different nature. But Ben knows this is not the elusive Horseman who has been the primary focus of folkloric tales in the area for many years because he can both feel and hear his presence. However, unlike others who fear the Headless Horseman, Ben can hear whispers in the woods at the end of a forbidden path, and he has visions of the Horseman who says he is there to protect him. Ben soon discovers connections between the recent murders and the death of his parents and realises he has been shaded from the truth about them his whole life. Thus begins a journey to unravel the mystery and establish his identity in the process. This is an enthralling and compulsively readable piece of horror fiction building on Irvings’ solid ground. Evoking such feelings as horror, terror, dread and claustrophobic oppressiveness, this tale invites you to immerse yourself in its sinister, creepy and disturbing narrative. The staggering beauty of the remote village location is juxtaposed with the darkness of the demons and devilish spirits that lurk there, and the village residents aren't exactly welcoming to outsiders or accepting of anyone different from their norm. What I love the most is that it is subtle and full of nuance, instead of the usual cheap thrills with which the genre is often pervaded, meaning the feeling of sheer panic creeps up on you when you least expect, and you come to the sudden realisation that the story has managed to get under your skin, into your psyche and even into your dreams (or should that be nightmares?) Published at a time when the nights are closing in and the light diminishes ever more rapidly, not to mention with Halloween around the corner, this is the perfect autumnal read for the spooky season full of both supernatural and real-world horrors. It begins innocuously enough to lull you into a false sense of security but soon becomes bleak and hauntingly atmospheric as well as frightening before descending into true nightmare-inducing territory. A chilling and eerie romp, and a story full of superstition, secrets, folklore and old wives’ tales and with messages about love, loss, belonging, family, grief, being unapologetically you and becoming more accepting and tolerant of those who are different. Highly recommended.

He could feel his heart beating in the back of his throat,

My husband and I have lived in Oregon for 55 years in Eugene, Portland, Neskowin and Hood River. We have explored much of Oregon and are avid readers of travel and history. We are familiar with Oregon’s bigoted history and Oregon’s positive and negative politics. From Bettie Denny’s fiction book I could picture places, people and events. The book begins and ends in the Lone Fir Cemetery founded in 1866 in southeast Portland. Murphy Gardener, a new Oregonian reporter, is assigned to cover the Halloween cemetery tales at the cemetery, meeting a black cat, and a new friend, Anji. Murphy and Anji soon meet for breakfast at the Zell Café and embark on a historical quest. Untangling a chain of events and people through maps, letters, photos and directories they sort though the detritus of lives. A photo and a dubious translation, ending at the Lone Fir Cemetery, give some probable answers to their quest. I love mysteries and Denny does an exquisite job of linking the present to the past. She visits The Oregon State Hospital Museum, Oregon Historical Society, Chinatown, Phil Knight Library, Columbia Gorge Discovery Center and Edgefield. She reads about suffrage, about the “incorrigible’” Abigail Scott Dunaway and her infamous brother Harvey Scott, publisher of the Oregonian. She uncovers past issues of sex slaves and current issues sex trafficking. She also showplaces current establishments such as the Bipartisan Café in Montavilla, The Sunshine Mills in The Dalles where she gathers with those who are aiding her in her historical quest. For those of you Oregonians who want a good mystery taking place in your own backyard, I recommend this book highly.

Perhaps it was the eerie shriek of the motion detector, but the hairs on the back of her neck were suddenly standing on end. Something in the atmosphere had shifted. The air was a little too tense, too cold, and too still. So very still. A chilling and invisible presence filled the room, and at that moment, there was no doubt in Kate’s mind. The séance had worked.

If I died in a freak accident while hurrying through Shibuya's notorious "scramble" intersection, where thousands of pedestrians crossed from all directions at once when the WALK light shifted to green, I hoped whoever performed my funeral service would know I died satisfied. Shibuya felt like being in the center of the vertical world, with tall buildings flashing advertisements, neon lights, and level after level of stores and restaurants visible through glass windows. So many people, so hurried, so much to look at and experience. Fashionista women wearing skinny pants with stiletto pumps riding bikes down crowded sidewalks. Harajuku girls with pink hair and crazy outfits. Loud izakaya bars where men's conversations and laughter spilled onto the street, and women walking by wearing kimonos with white socks tucked into flip-flops. Young people strutting around dressed in kosupure ("cosplay," Nik translated) outfits from their favorite anime, like it was Halloween every day here. TOO MUCH FUN. I didn't want to die, but if I did, I would tell the souls I met in the afterlife: Don't feel bad about my premature end. I saw it all in my short time down in the upworld of Tokyo.

The gloating continues, with the following sentence: “The illusion of world supremacy played a cruel joke on Washington.” Of course, illusions don’t play cruel jokes – only people play cruel jokes. It was, in fact, the secret structures of the Communist Party Soviet Union and KGB that facilitated the cruel joke. As Pravda noted, “The situation has been developing to the above-mentioned scenario for over two decades.” I have been anticipating this moment for 27 years; that is, the moment when the Russians would pull off their democratic Halloween mask and reveal their totalitarian face. I have never had the illusion that America or the West would “wake up” before the Kremlin leaders had gained a critical advantage. At the same time I do not believe they will prevail in the end. When nearly everyone realizes what has happened the whole world will crave an accounting. What is written here is a small attempt toward that goal. It is not a matter of blaming anyone, but of pulling ideas and people together at the eleventh hour. Whatever disaster befalls us, we are better equipped to face the odds when we possess a clear picture of what went wrong. This picture must include a detailed account of that fatal and seductive optimism which even now prevents a full understanding of the problem we face. The leaders of the West could not change course because the logic of our civilization is the logic of economic optimism. Of course, economic optimism is itself necessary to economic success. Such optimism is generally good except it completely fails when confronting an enemy. The fiasco was a quarter of a century in the making, and now it is time to replace economic optimism with political realism. Do not be fooled by the apparent strength of the enemy; for just as the enemy’s weakness was a partial façade, so is the enemy’s current strength. Politically organized psychopaths, however clever or ruthless they might be, can only succeed if we surrender to them. And we must never do such a thing. The psychopath under the bed has now come out to play; and although he has better toys, he is still an ineffectual being, a misfit and a failure. He can harm many people, but he cannot build anything of value. He dwells in a House of Lies atop a hill made of corpses. He promises only death, and not life. And this is a truth we must never forget.

I tried to be a good daughter, and ended up without an arm. I tried to be a good sister, and lost my brother. And I tried to be a good girlfriend, and…